


Man in the Mirror

by wynnebat



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Magical Shenanigans, Mirror of Erised, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 07:33:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29881185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wynnebat/pseuds/wynnebat
Summary: After Professor Dumbledore explains the Mirror of Erised's purpose, Harry asks, "What if I don't know who the person in the mirror is?""You don't recognize this person at all?" Dumbledore asks."No," Harry says. "I've never met him."He's not Harry's father, because they look nothing alike, and everyone always tells Harry that he looks like James. The man in the mirror looks nice. Cool, that's the word. He looks like he could beat Malfoy in a midnight duel instead of having to rely on punching him. He looks like he could out-dress both Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon without even trying. And especially, he looks like he wouldn't care that Harry is the Boy-Who-Lived or fawn over him.
Relationships: Hermione Granger & Harry Potter & Ron Weasley, Original Percival Graves/Harry Potter
Comments: 25
Kudos: 352





	Man in the Mirror

**Author's Note:**

> The first section of this story was written in 2019 and originally posted on Tumblr.

Harry's reflection doesn't appear as Harry steps closer to the mirror, the hood of the invisibility cloak drawn back. He can't hear Filch or Mrs. Norris anymore, nor anyone else for that matter. All that is here is Harry and the man in the mirror. Harry stops just a few footsteps away. When he turns his head, the reflection doesn't do the same. The man in the mirror is old. Not nearly as old as Dumbledore or McGonagall, but maybe as old as Snape. There is a suit and tie under his robes, and he looks fancy in a way that no one else does in their billowy black robes. Despite the fact that Harry still wears Dudley's castoffs beneath his robes, he doesn't feel embarrassed over his own lack in comparison to his reflection. Not when the man looks at him with warmth, when his lips lift just a little as he sees Harry. 

The night is long and cold, and yet Harry spends the entirety of it in front of the mirror. He comes back the next day, the one after that, and on the third day, there is another person in the room. After Professor Dumbledore explains the Mirror of Erised's purpose, Harry asks, "What if I don't know who the person in the mirror is?"

"You don't recognize this person at all?" Dumbledore asks.

"No," Harry says. "I've never met him."

He's not Harry's father, because they look nothing alike, and everyone always tells Harry that he looks like James. The man in the mirror looks nice. Cool, that's the word. He looks like he could beat Malfoy in a midnight duel instead of having to rely on punching him. He looks like he could out-dress both Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon without even trying. And especially, he looks like he wouldn't care that Harry is the Boy-Who-Lived or fawn over him. 

"Hm," Dumbledore says, stroking his beard. "That is a conundrum. The Mirror of Erised is as incredibly magical artifact, and it would not show you such a man without reason. Perhaps he is important to your future or your past. You would do best to remember him."

"I don't think I could forget him," Harry admits, but he lets himself be guided away from the mirror. 

The next day, the Mirror of Erised is gone. Harry sits in the room for a while anyway. When he closes his eyes, he can see the man again. Mysteries have always captured his attention quickly and forcefully, and this is no different. It might be the biggest mystery in the castle. Bigger than that of Fluffy or the mysterious Flamel because this affects Harry personally. His past or his future, whichever it is. When he goes back to the Gryffindor tower that night, he tells Ron all about the man in the mirror. It becomes a side project for Harry. He looks through various wizarding books and newspapers, searching for the man in the mirror. Ron and Hermione help as much as they can, but as they only have dark-haired and sharp-dressed to go on, they spend most of their time researching Flamel. Altogether, they all spend too much time at the library. 

At the end of the year, Quirrell, who is not just Quirrell but someone more, someone worse, pushes Harry toward the mirror and orders, "Tell me what you see. Tell me now."

"I see my family," Harry says, meeting the eyes of the man in the mirror. He swallows, terror running through him, but the man in the mirror looks at him with pride. He holds out a blood-red stone to Harry. Within moments, Harry feels its weight in his pocket. 

"Liar!" Quirrell who is Voldemort screams. 

And then there are spells rebounding, the sound of broken glass, and fire, too much fire, and Harry passes out with Voldemort's screams in his ears and the man in the mirror's hand reaching for him. 

When Harry wakes up in the hospital wing, the mirror is gone for good, taking the man inside with it. Harry manages to sit up in bed. He asks, "Is it all gone? Can I have a shard of it?"

"The mirror's magic is gone from it," Dumbledore cautions, but he gives Harry a shard on his next visit to the hospital wing. "It doesn't do to dwell on things that cannot be, my dear boy."

"I understand, sir," Harry replies. 

When Harry looks into it, there is no one looking back at him. He keeps it anyway. Harry tapes the edges after the first time he cuts himself on them. His blood gathers at the edges of the mirror, drying and vanishing before Harry can wipe it off with a cloth. 

The next morning, Harry looks into the bathroom mirror and gets the shock of his life—okay, maybe the shock of his day, considering Harry's life tends to be a rollercoaster—when he sees the man in this mirror, just to the side of Harry's own reflection. 

The man's eyes grow wide, as though this is unexpected for him too, and he looks around the room. Harry does too, but he can't see the man beside himself. 

When he looks back, the man is gone. 

It happens again and again throughout the years, to the point that Harry begins to consider the man a constant companion. His glimpses of him are fleeting, disappointingly so, but they happen often enough. Harry sees the man in his dormitory's bathroom mirror and in the cracked mirror in his room at the Dursleys'. He sees him in the round, ornate mirror in Grimmauld place and the little pocket mirror Hermione carries. 

Harry doesn't part with the piece of the Mirror of Erised that he assumes causes these visions. As the years go on, Harry rarely takes it out of his pocket. It's no protective amulet, nor is it able to fulfill its former purpose. It simply brings him comfort. He needs that much as the years pass and the battle against Voldemort grows more vicious. He loses dear friends, allies, and much of the innocence that even the Dursleys hadn't managed to stomp out of him. War is a kind of hell Harry wouldn't wish on anyone. 

On the worst of nights, the man in the mirror shows up in his dreams. He never says a word. Whether this is because he's the strong and silent type or Harry is too tired to muster up his imagination to the task, Harry doesn't know. There is comfort in this anyway, in sitting next to the man in the mirror. In Harry's dreams, they aren't doing anything important. Sometimes they take out Ron's old chess set, the way it looked before the twins destroyed it by accident, and other times they fly walk around the castle. Harry means to give the man in his dreams a proper tour, but more often than not, he doesn't say a thing. It's only a dream. He misses Hogwarts with a deep ache, one that doesn't go away when he wakes up in a tent in the Forest of Dean, shivering under a thin blanket and thunder and lightening resounding through the night. Harry bears the locket horcrux better than either Hermione or Ron. He credits it to the mirror's help, though Hermione is always quick to say that she hadn't been able to find proof that it still has its magic. She's never been sure what to make of Harry's claims of seeing a man in mirrors. To be honest, Harry isn't sure, either. 

When Harry looks into the wrong end of the elder wand, his own nowhere in sight, he hopes he'll see the man in the mirror. It's a mystery that has spanned years, one he isn't any closer to solving. Perhaps death will be kind enough to give him a clue. Instead, it is Dumbledore who he meets, and he finds that death is not as permanent as one might think. Harry doesn't understand everything that went into his sacrifice, but it feels good to finally defeat Voldemort once and for all. In time, the papers dub him the Man Who Conquered. It's a better title than the one he had before. 

Harry spends his first summer Voldemort-free in auror training camp with Ron and Neville. At the end of the summer, they are offered the chance to return to Hogwarts while the new DADA professor runs some voluntary training for the seventh years interested in joining the program. Andera is a former auror, former only through the chaos of war, and scarily competent. Alternatively, they can continue with regular auror training and become junior aurors faster than anyone who takes the Hogwarts route will be able to. 

"We better not tell Hermione about this," Ron says, holding the paper detailing what going back to Hogwarts would involve. "Homework and training drills? Kill me now."

"I'm going to do it," Neville says, shrugging. "Don't you want to graduate?"

"You sound like my mum," Ron groans. 

Harry picks up one of the papers, tapping his finger on the sharp corner of the page. He does miss Hogwarts. Once upon a time, seven years ago, it became his first home. Now, Harry has a home in Grimmauld Place, a spare bed in the Burrow for whenever he stays over, and a free room at the Leaky whenever he wants it because Tom won't let him pay. He doesn't need Hogwarts, not in the way he used to when Voldemort lurked around every corner. Still, it seems like something he should do. Go back, graduate, then somehow find a way to move on with his life. From Voldemort and the war and the man in the mirror, who Harry is close to giving up on finding. 

"We definitely can't tell Hermione," Harry agrees, and shares a look with Ron. 

It's a familiar action, years and years of moments of them knowing exactly what the other's thinking coalescing. It's been hard to get used to being around other people after their time on the run. And to be without Hermione, who's all the way in Australia this summer, finding a way to heal her relationship with her parents. The war made all three of them a little codependent, a lot overprotective of each other. Had Hermione not asked them to stay behind, they would have already packed their bags and joined her. His relationship with Ginny would have collapsed even faster than it already had, but that much feels inevitable. A year apart hadn't done their relationship good. They're too different now. Ginny understands him in some of the same ways as Ron and Hermione—and she understands that Harry is looking for something he can't name. Without Voldemort, he can't seem to find his purpose, can't find something and think this, this is it, this is what he wants to do with the rest of his days. 

But until then... Harry reads over the paper again. Between training and homework and rebuilding any parts of the castle that still need it, he'll be too busy to worry about his place in the universe. "Hermione would make us study guides again."

"Harry, you're going to give me nightmares," Ron says, but with a giant sigh he signs his name. "She'd make me do it anyway. And if not—Mum would." With a stubborn look, as if someone would actually judge him for it, Ron adds, "Would be kind of nice to go back to the castle for a year."

"It would be," Harry agrees. Unbidden comes the sense memory of the touch of stone against his hands and a broom in his steady grip. He hasn't flown in months. It's not on the auror training curriculum for another four months. Harry has no illusions about being allowed onto the school's quidditch team—the actual seventh years should have a turn at the team's positions, even if competitiveness might drive them to beg Harry to stay on for another year—but it would be freeing to have the space to fly in again. "It really would be."

And so, they go. 

With some reluctance, with some horror at being proper adults—and second wizarding war veterans, besides—tasked with homework and spellwork, they return to Hogwarts. Harry isn't convinced that this is the best decision for him until he stumbles out of the boys' dormitory a few weeks into September, passes Hermione, who's reading a book in the common room, and it feels as though a Lumos has been lit over the world. He'd only gotten a glimpse of the photograph in her book. It's enough. 

"Wait, hold on," Harry calls out, stumbling and righting himself in his haste to get to Hermione's book. He flips back a page, then sticks his finger at the portrait. "Who's that?"

The man in the photo glares lightly at him for poking at the photo in such a way. He reaches out to touch Harry's finger before looking out into the distance. Harry can't feel the press of the man's hand, but he can definitely feel the thrum of excitement rushing through his veins. 

"That is Director Percival Graves of the Magical Congress of the United States of America. Graduate of Ilvermorny, respected auror, director of their DMLE. 1888 through 1926, although his date of death is only assumed as his body was never found." She must take Harry's slack-jawed expression for confusion, because she adds, "He was abducted in the autumn of 1926 when Gellert Grindelwald assumed his identity in his search for a, oh what's the word, obscurus, to use in his planned war on muggle-kind." When Harry still says nothing, she looks at him, really looks at him, and says in a hushed tone, "It's him, isn't it?"

"That's the man in the mirror," Harry agrees. He drops down onto the arm of the couch. His legs feel like jelly. "That's him."

After all these years, Harry's finally found him. 

"But what does this mean?" Hermione asks. She peers down at the biographical blurb again. "Harry, he's been dead for three quarters of a century. There's a chance he could have survived, I suppose, but why would he have hidden? And if he survived until now, he would be over a hundred. I don't see what kind of impact he could have on you, past or present."

"Well," Harry says thoughtfully, preserving every feature of the man's portrait to memory. "I guess we have to save him."

Hermione looks at him with a dubious look, one that quickly turns into a sigh. "I don't know what I expected. You've only been talking about him for eight years."

Harry smiles her way. 

"Don't you smile at me, Harry Potter," Hermione huffs. "You're asking me to do extra research during my NEWTs year. Do you know how long I've been looking forward to these exams?" She shakes her head. Then, before Harry can offer to do it all himself, she says, "Tell me everything again. Start from the beginning."

And so Harry does. For the first time, he feels as though Hermione entirely believes him. Ron has always been faster to take strange things at face value—one of the effects of growing up with magic, Harry thinks—but Hermione needed the push of Harry recognizing the man's face in a book. 

No longer is he the man in the mirror; he is Percival Graves. 

Harry says the name quietly to himself and thinks of Dumbledore's words. His trust of Dumbledore has been shaken over and over again, but he wants to trust what he said all those years ago: that somehow, this man will play a large role in Harry's life. 

Within a few days, Hermione sits down next to Harry and Ron as they play chess, and says, "This is only conjecture, not fact. Are you sure you want to hear it?"

"I'm sure," Harry replies, giving her his undivided attention. 

Briskly, Hermione says, "You need to go back to the beginning by putting the Mirror of Erised back together again. Whatever connection you have to this man, it is facilitated by the mirror. We don't know what powers it has. We can't, not unless we return it to its former state. It showed you this man for a reason. Let's make it give it to us."

"You're saying we," Harry says. 

It's not that he questioned it, but, well. The man in the mirror has always been Harry's private curiosity, his own little secret. It's strange and wonderful to finally be able to share him with his friends. 

"It's always we." Ron rolls his eyes. "You'd think you'd know that by now."

"Shut up," Harry says, feeling light. He takes the piece of the Mirror of Erised out of his pocket and places it onto the chessboard. "We have one piece already."

"One thousand more to go," Ron says, sharing a suffering look with Hermione. But with a wave of his wand, he puts away the chess pieces and starts plotting with Harry about the best way to track down pieces of the mirror. 

They're out there somewhere. All Harry has to do is find them. 

Which, not quite surprisingly, turns out harder than Harry first expects. Around half the pieces of the mirror stayed within Hogwarts all these years. The house elves liked the magical presence of the glass and kept it for themselves. It takes Harry, Hermione, and Ron a while to gather enough socks, knitted hats, and pieces of other charmed mirrors to swap the elves for their pieces. 

It's the other half of the mirror which is a problem: souvenirs taken by students and professors, misplaced and lost over the years. Or, in the case of Pansy Parkinson, held onto out of spite until Harry publicly proclaims friendship with her. 

It takes years to gather all the pieces. In the meantime, Harry is the first to arrive at Andera's training sessions and the last to leave. By the end of the year, some of the urgency has faded, though not in the way his friends hoped. Harry takes another few years to graduate from the auror academy, hone his skills as a junior auror, and become one of the country's top magical object specialists with all the other things he finds in addition to pieces of the mirror. 

Sometimes when a piece of the mirror is particularly elusive, Harry wonders why he just can't quit. At its core, it is a selfish desire. Harry is intimately aware of this. He simply doesn't care. He lives in a beautiful, magical world, one that can connect him to a man from the past. Harry won't pass this chance up, not when it would otherwise forever haunt him. He doesn't know Percival, not truly, and he can't plan for something like this. All he can do is plan for everything around the meeting and hope it's enough. 

By the time Harry gathers all the pieces of the Mirror of Erised, he has known Percival's name for six years and glimpsed him in mirrors a hundred more times. The mirror is dirty with sweat, blood, and glue as Harry puts it back together. 

Even when it's complete, the mirror is covered in cracks and lines from where it broke.

It won't be whole again, Harry thinks, and wonders if it was all for nothing. Years of work all down the drain, and for a man he doesn't truly know. 

Harry places his hand against the glass, fingers catching against the rough edges of the joined pieces. For a long moment, Harry closes his eyes and tries to let his dreams go. Tries to let Percival go. 

But when he opens eyes, he sees Percival Graves. 

He's nothing like Harry has ever seen him before: haggard and tired, hands chained together as he follows a woman across an ornate mirrored hallway. She doesn't look back at him, assured that her prisoner will follow. Harry takes her as one of Grindelwald's people. 

He sees the moment when Percival notices him, sees the hopelessness in his gaze. 

Harry's heart goes out to him. His hand does, too. 

"Come with me," Harry says, and he knows Percival can't hear him—he never has been able to before—but the gesture is unmistakable. 

Percival turns to face him fully. For a long moment, he seems to wonder if he can trust Harry. If this is really too good to be true. But what does a man in chains have to lose? Percival approaches the mirror in a sprint. Behind him, his jailer yells something, but it's too late. 

Within the barest moment, hard glass turns to warm skin under Harry's hand, and he pulls the man in the mirror through. 

Percival falls on top of him, momentum bringing them both crashing to the floor. Harry is winded and more relieved than he's ever been in his life. 

"You're alright," Harry assures him, marveling at the fact that his mirror man is a flesh and blood person. With a quick spell from Harry, Percival is free from his shackles. "You're safe now. I'm Harry."

"I know you," Percival replies. He shifts his weight slightly, leveraging himself against the floor, but he doesn't rise. "You're the man from my mirrors. All of them."

Harry smiles up at him. "Hullo, Percival."

Despite his evident shock, Percival smiles in return. "You drove me half to madness with your appearances. I couldn't discern the cause of the magic."

"It was the Mirror of Erised," Harry explains. 

It takes Percival a bare moment to understand. "The Mirror of Desire."

Harry reaches to touch the side of Percival's face, fingers gently skimming his cheek. He shouldn't do this with a stranger—but Percival doesn't feel like a stranger. Harry feels as though he has known him all his life. "A wise man said to me that whoever I saw in the mirror would be important to me and that I should best remember him. I've never been able to forget you, Percival."

"Neither have I," Percival admits. "You wouldn't let yourself be forgotten. Everywhere I turned, there you were, from my everyday to my lowest point. Your mirror wasn't wrong."

"No, it wasn't," Harry agrees. 

He lifts his head just a little, and Percival meets him the rest of the way. For the first time, Harry knows exactly what his life has been missing: Percival Graves.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'm also on [Tumblr](https://wynnefic.tumblr.com/).


End file.
